El Cuartelejo

The pueblo was built in a Plains Apache homeland. Apache people of the Dismal River culture lived at this site from about 1450, and the University of Kansas digs by S. W. Williston and H. T. Martin from 1898 to 1900 found their occupation before and after the years they shared it with the Pueblo refugees. Irrigation ditches from a spring watered the crops. In 1922 the Steeles gave two acres around the ruin to the Kansas Daughters of the American Revolution, who set a monument in 1925, and the family's land became the state park in 1928.

What the plaque says

El Cuartelejo Reconstructed here are the remains of a seven-room pueblo believed to have been built by Pueblo Indians from New Mexico. According to Spanish records Indians from Taos and Picuris Pueblos, fleeing Spanish rule, joined their Apache allies at a place the Spanish called El Cuartelejo. The Taos Indians came in the 1640s, but several years later Spanish soldiers forced them to return to New Mexico. In 1696 the Picuris settled here but also were returned to New Mexico by Juan de Ulibarri in 1706. Later Herbert and Eliza Steele owned this property and in 1898 invited scientists to investigate a low mound where they had found artifacts and burned corn. Excavation revealed stone and bone tools, pottery from the pueblos of the Southwest, large quantities of burned corn, and the stone foundation of an adobe pueblo. No other pueblo sites have been located this far north and east. In 1970 the foundation was rebuilt to appear as it had when discovered in 1898. It is listed in the National Register of Historic Places and is designated a National Historic Landmark. Erected by the State of Kansas

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Historic Lake Scott State Park — 0.3 mi
  A spring-fed lake in a hidden canyon off U.S. 83, where water seeping out between gravel and chalk drew Apache and Pueblo farmers, a homesteading couple, and finally the state.
• Keystone Gallery — 5.2 mi
  A homesteaders' stone church of 1917 on US-83 above the Smoky Hill valley, rebuilt off the power grid as a fossil museum by a family that has hunted the chalk since 1925.
• Little Jerusalem Badlands State Park — 8.8 mi
  A maze of Niobrara chalk walls above the Smoky Hill River, once ranch land, now held by The Nature Conservancy for raptors and a buckwheat that grows nowhere else.
• Monument Rocks — 12 mi
  Chalk towers and an arch from the floor of an inland sea, standing beside a county road in Gove County pasture, still losing pieces to weather and still full of nesting cliff swallows.

More markers nearby

• El Cuartelejo — 3.3 mi